Release Management Team

The Release Management Team (RMT) oversees the final stage of each development cycle, to ensure all open items are closed before a major release.

Duties:

• Meet the deadlines pgsql-release@ sets for beta1 and final release.
• When the open items list has an unowned item, promptly inform the associated committer that they own that item.
• Approve the creation of the corresponding stable branch, the welcoming of PostgreSQL submissions, and the resumption of CommitFests.
• Nag item owners to ensure forward progress.

Powers, exercisable by majority vote of the RMT, even in the face of no consensus or contrary consensus:

• Approve the commit of a patch for the purpose of resolving an open item, including reversion commits.
• Add or remove open items.
• Enact a feature freeze.

Before using one of those powers, the Release Management Team (RMT) should make more than zero effort to let normal community processes arrive at a sufficient answer. Given the aggressive schedule, the RMT may nonetheless use these powers quickly and often.

pgsql-release@ appoints the RMT and has the power to dissolve it.

Best Practices

• Have scheduled, weekly meetings to:
  • Review open items and assign who is responsible for seeing them through
  • Discuss timing for beta and final releases
  • Discuss challenging issues and brainstorm ways to help find a solution
  • Report back to pgsql-release with a summary of meeting, and any actionable items -release needs to be aware of
  • Take notes; this is a good reference to look back and see how things are progressing
• Agree to a chat medium of choice to be able to quickly reach each other
• When prompting on updates to open items, try to bring something to drive it forward: a patch, a test, a question
• Hard decisions happen: it's good to discuss with others in the community to get more feedback before reaching a conclusion
  • Bad news is easier to deal with when a decision is given fair consideration and transparent reasoning

History

• 16: Alvaro Herrera, Amit Kapila, Jonathan Katz
• 15: John Naylor, Jonathan Katz, Michael Paquier
• 14: Andrew Dunstan, Peter Geoghegan, Michael Paquier
• 13: Peter Geoghegan, Álvaro Herrera, Jonathan Katz
• 12: Andres Freund, Michael Paquier, Tomas Vondra
• 11: Andres Freund, Jonathan Katz, Álvaro Herrera
• 10: Peter Eisentraut, Robert Haas, and Noah Misch
• 9.6: Robert Haas, Álvaro Herrera, Noah Misch